Wildfires are burning across the United States right now, but we have some very unwelcome company: for months there have been raging fires in Russia as well, conflagrations burning up vast swaths of the forests there.

The fires are the bright curved lines, and you can also see milky smoke to the right. To give you a sense of scale, the largest of these fires is over 50 km (30 miles) across! That’s so huge I have a hard time comprehending it; the large High Park fire in Colorado earlier this year was far smaller.

Cameras like this one on Suomi-NPP help gauge the size and location of fires, and after the worst is over they can show the extent of the damage (especially when coupled with other satellite imagery). These are critical tools in our understanding of natural disasters, and can help save lives in the future.

I want to show you another picture, too. Last week when I was flying home from a wonderful visit to Portland, Oregon to give a talk, I noticed something odd out my airplane window. After a minute or two, it became clear that what I was seeing was a big wildfire:

There were several small fires generating smoke (to the left of the big plume), and then a very big pyrocumulus (fire-generated) cloud. The plume from the combined fires blew for dozens of kilometers downwind; you can see ripples in the plume as it flowed over the local topography.

I wasn’t sure where we were exactly when I took the picture, so when I got home I looked up wildfires in Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. I was amazed to see that there were so many fires I couldn’t pin down which one I was seeing. That’s how bad this summer is; it’s been so hot and dry in the US that fires are common enough to become hard to identify from the air. If you do happen to know which one I saw, please let me know.

I generally say that it’s hard to pin specific weather events on global warming, but that what we’re seeing these days is consistent with what we expect of a planet getting hotter. That’s true, but it’s becoming more clear that many of these events are at the very least helped along by our changing climate. I’ll be writing more about that very soon. Stay tuned.

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Most (all?) of these fires are occurring in the Siberia/Far East areas of Russia, and some more centrally? The pic is good, but it would be nice to have a map for location, i.e. info is hard to get, and Siberia is huge… which isn’t your bailiwick, I know, but…

One thing that helps the Russian fire be larger is the sparse population of the region. Sparsely populated regions tend to be less conserved (in forestry terms, that would be fighting every fire, as has long been done in the US. To judge by the pattern of fires, it looks like one humdinger of a thunderstorm hit!
The upside is, the large scale fires in Russia would tend to be less injurious to the forest than those in the US, as the excessive conservation against ALL fires permitted massive mat growth and foliage overgrowth.

If you guys come over to England you’ll see why we don’t have to worry about forest fires. It’s been bucketing down with rain for months! This is probably also due to global warming, a warmer Atlantic evaporates more after all. We have dreams about it being dry enough for wildfires, but it doesn’t seem very likely…

On a recent flight from Newcastle to the Gold Coast, I spotted maybe 20 small fires in bushland areas up the NSW coast. Another flight last year between Brisbane and Mackay saw a lot up the Qld coast, and judging by the time of year (it was September) a lot of them would have been the result of planned hazard reduction burns by the Fire Service in the lead up to the summer fire season.

It’s amazing to see how even a very small fire can fill a valley with thick, grey, choking smoke as it lifts up and follows the wind. As it disperses further it turns the horison into a hazy mess. Good for beautiful sunsets but not so good for air quality.

Seem like from the time stamp on the picture, the flight path and the angle out the window you ought to be able to pin it down. But really exactly which fire it was doesn’t really matter. The point is the volume of fires being experienced this summer.

This is not the worst fire season ever, and there is no way to definitively pin this on climate change, but as you say it is consistent with the predictions made by climate change and that at least ought to be one of the top things considered when thinking about these fires.

That Russian fire is one of the most impressive pictures I’ve seen of a wild fire. I’ve been on the edge of huge fires in Southern California and even driven through Angeles National Forest when it was on fire, but seeing these in person or even on a map doesn’t really communicate the scale the way this picture does.

This is tens of thousands of hectares, imagine what one of the few historical million plus hectare fires would look like from space. Let’s hope we never find out.

And if I could recommend it, I got a Casio Exilim GPS point’n’shoot camera for the last birthday, which I just love. The built-in GPS writes to the EXIF file attached to each picture and includes the geographic coordinates of where the picture was shot. Accuracy is generally within a few tens of meters.

As an extra, you can get the freeware IrfanView viewer and, with the EXIF plugin installed, it will zoom you to the GoogleEarth position where the picture was taken.